Haute Couture, Thy Name Is Not Scientist

"A [student] ther was of oxenford also ... Ful thredbare was his [overcoat] ... For hym was [rather] have at his beddes heed Twenty bookes, clad in blak or reed, Of Aristotle and his philosophie, Than robes riche, or [fiddle], or gay psaltry." --Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, circa 1386 "I can understand why the faculty would want to wear sandals, but do they have to be flip-flops?" --Caltech postdoc, 2003 True, we now have teraflop computers instead of parchment, but in one respect, not much has changed in academia since Chaucer's day. Look at a vacation photograph of my family, and without any clues, you can pick out my first cousin, the marine biologist. The full red beard (and matching chest hair) dripping with seawater is a dead giveaway. But my brother the businessman, even in a bathing suit, looks like he could be presiding over a board meeting. Why, I've often wondered, while surveying a room full of people trained to observe, is personal appearance the one thing that scientists seem to consistently overlook? Do they simply lack whatever part of the visual cortex that keeps stripes from plaids?* This fascinates me; my father's family is in fashion, a business in which you literally are what you wear. In their field, dressing badly is as professionally suspect as being a bald hairdresser. I once inadvertently mortified my stepmother by wearing chartreuse. To be the family black sheep was chic, but to be its chartreuse sheep--aaargh! Scientists, it seems, have completely opposite values when it comes to fashion. Dress like you care, and you risk being regarded as someone of low moral character, with obviously diminished ambition and misplaced priorities. "You are whoring after false gods, worshipping antique deities; this is deeply ingrained back to Chaucer's day," says fashion historian Anne Hollander, author of Seeing Through Clothes. "Read [biblical] Revelations. The Whore of Babylon is clad in silks and purples; everybody good is dressed in white raiment--pure enlightenment, even without lab coats." The only exceptions made are for what Monica Eiland, a neuroscientist who switched from academe to biotech, calls "Uber PIs, [such as] David Baltimore. They seem to dress well as a sign that they're now beyond working at the bench." Having seen Baltimore looking both urbane and miserable on a predictably suffocating 90°F Pasadena, Calif., day, I wonder about the line between professionalism and masochism. But are those who dress ultra casually under the same pressure to have the "right" look? Yes, says Hollander. The paradox is, since there's now so much choice in how to look, there's much more need to conform to the style of one's own group. "Scientists have a very firm sense of how they ought to be looking," she explains, "scientists care desperately to look right, same as everybody else, but they don't want to be connected [through their attire] to worlds other than science. I don't think scientists dress badly, they dress to be among the elect." Nevertheless, some take "The Scientist Look" to extremes. I've seen researchers who dress with enviable elegance, but there's always some tenure-tragedy who's still wearing a job interview suit from 1974. It's as if its owner is engaged in a lifelong experiment to prove that polyester jacquard is indestructible. But here's the real truth: That anachronistic outfit is worn with militant pride, for its wearer is concentrating on eternal verities, de contemptus mundi. "When we present ourselves to the world, we like to emphasize content over form," says physicist Peter Feibelman, author of A Ph.D. Is Not Enough: A Guide to Survival in Science. "The message is: I'm here not to impress you with my wardrobe or to dress up inconsequential ideas with graphics; I want you to concentrate on the content of my work." Emily Toth, literary biographer and author of Ms. Mentor's Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia, suggests that this stance goes back at least to classical Greece. "Part of the ethos of science is to be unaware, to purport to concentrate on higher things, to have your head in the clouds," she says. "In The Clouds, Aristophanes has the philosophers with their heads in the clouds stumbling into ditches." Using a more contemporary example, Eiland recalls the lab coat she never changed, despite a stain that made it look "like I'd been shot through the heart and bled out purple blood." So in the end, you all at least have a good excuse, unlike people in my field. (For a journalist to critique another profession's attire is a particularly egregious case of the pot-kettle-black. What I'm wearing while I'm writing this could get me arrested if I walked outside.) To be even fairer, I recently attended a talk by a female PI dressed in a black, silk gabardine suit paired with a sage green blouse. The science was fascinating. But sage, now that was brilliant. * Disclaimer here, before everybody starts shooting off E-mails. Of course, I'm not talking about you. I mean your colleagues. And you do know which ones I mean. Karen Heyman (klhscience@yahoo.com) is a science writer in Santa Monica, Calif. function sendData() { document.frm.pathName.value = location.pathname; result = false if (document.frm.score[0].checked) result = true; if (document.frm.score[1].checked) result = true; if (document.frm.score[2].checked) result = true; if (document.frm.score[3].checked) result = true; if (document.frm.score[4].checked) result = true; if (!result) alert("Please select") return result; } .myradio{background-color : #94bee5} Please indicate on a 1 - 5 scale how strongly you would recommend this article to your colleagues? Not recommended 1 2 3 4 5 Highly recommended Please register your vote

Haute Couture, Thy Name Is Not Scientist

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